Starting Saturday, on the lawless streets of Hillsboro Village, The Belcourt will devote its entire summer of weekend repertory programming to the movies' monument to manifest destiny, the Western. Even its mixed breeding is all-American—a veritable Ellis Island where an Italian director remakes a Japanese samurai film in Spain, with a Hollywood cowboy as cheroot-chewing antihero.
That movie, 1964's A Fistful of Dollars, takes its place among 14 selections spanning everything from iconic star-director teams—John Wayne and John Ford, James Stewart and Anthony Mann, Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher, Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone—to the late-model masterworks of Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman. June covers the classics, July explores the oater's limits in revisionist takes (with the debatable inclusion of 1960's The Magnificent Seven), and August focuses on the operatic spaghetti Westerns of maestro Sergio Leone.
Highlights include a rarely screened print of Howard Hawks' 1952 gem The Big Sky (June 13-15); a double feature of Boetticher cult favorites, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station (June 27-29); and the first local screening in almost 40 years of Leone's little-seen 1971 epic Duck, You Sucker!, a.k.a. A Fistful of Dynamite (Aug. 22-24). The series closes with Leone's magnificent Once Upon a Time in the West, with Henry Fonda's angel of death making an entrance—and exit—for the ages. Below, the full schedule:
The Searchers (June 6-8)
The Big Sky (June 13-15)
Winchester '73 (June 20-22)
Ride Lonesome / Comanche Station (June 27-29)
The Magnificent Seven (July 4-6)
The Wild Bunch (July 11-13)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (July 18-20)
Little Big Man (July 25-27)
A Fistful of Dollars (Aug. 1-3)
For a Few Dollars More (Aug. 8-10)
The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (Aug. 15-17)
Duck, You Sucker! (Aug. 22-24)
Once Upon a Time in the West (Aug. 29-31)
For more information, see belcourt.org. JIM RIDLEY
